For a moment, we both stand still, engulfed in the oppressing darkness around us. Buried alive.
No, I refuse to accept that fate. There must be a way out, another secret lever to set the door in motion from within the chamber. But we need to see to search for it.
“Try your flashlight again,” I tell Winter.
I hear rustling, and a few seconds later a feeble beam of light cuts through the darkness, illuminating Winter’s anxious face.
“Great,” I say.
“Great?” she hisses back, her features going from scared to angry. “There’s nothing great about our current situation. In case you haven’t noticed, that nice little stone just dropped to the floor and we’re standing on the wrong side of it. So unless you’re hiding a secret stash of dynamite in your backpack, I don’t see how we’re ever going to get out.”
“Don’t be so pessimistic. Whoever built this place must have left a switch for the door on the inside—otherwise, they’d risk getting trapped themselves. We just have to find the button before your lamp goes out again.” I point at the flashlight. “Let’s go.”
We run down the passage and stop at the door. With desperate energy, we begin to feel up and down the slab of stone and the sides of the tunnel. But we find no knob, or contraption, nor a retracting disk.
“There’s nothing here,” Winter says in a panicked voice. “It doesn’t work from the inside.”
I let my palms roam the bare walls a little longer before I have to admit defeat.
“Let’s go back to the other room and check our supplies,” I say.
In the treasure chamber, Winter sits behind Smith’s leftover stockpile and balances the headlamp on the floor so that the light points up in a vertical beam. Then she sorts the food, looking around herself with a forlorn expression.
“Well,” she sighs. “At least our grave will be pretty.”
I sit next to her. “Don’t be melodramatic. No one’s going to die.”
“No? And how do you suppose we’re getting out?”
“We came with a team, remember? When we don’t return, they’ll come find us.”
“What if Smith ‘deals’ with them the way he dealt with us?”
“Someone will notice the camp has gone silent. Both Dr. Boonjan and I checked in regularly with the satellite phone, and Somchai did too to coordinate supply runs with the villagers.”
“Even if someone does notice we’re missing, they still have to get to us through the jungle. And then they have to figure out how to open the secret door! What if they can’t? What if they don’t even realize it’s there?” Her voice rises a notch. “We’re going to die in here.”
She makes some excellent points, but I refuse to give up hope. We need to stay calm and coherent, and the best way to do that is to busy ourselves with mundane tasks. “We’re not going to die,” I say firmly. “Now, let’s be practical and see where we’re at with provisions.”
My steadiness seems to calm her down, and we empty both our backpacks and spread everything on the floor. I do a quick assessment. “We have enough food for three or four days, but water is going to become a problem much sooner. We’ll have to ration it.”
“Splendid,” Winter replies, sarcastic.
I take a sip from my canteen and encourage Winter to do the same. We share a protein bar, allow ourselves another sip of water, and then I get up to better explore the walls of our prison, in the faint hope of finding some means of escape. But my systematic examination yields no results yet again.
Defeated, I sink to the floor and join Winter in leaning my back against the wall where the gold coin boxes were stashed. Two seconds later, the flashlight begins to flicker again.
“How long have we been in here?” I ask.
Winter shrugs. “A few hours?” She shows me her bare wrist. “I don’t have my watch. It was impossible to wear with the scuba-diving gloves.”
“Yeah, same here.”
The flickering of the headlamp grows more hectic.
“Death by starvation, trapped in a Thai temple,” Winter says grimly. “That’s not the way I figured I’d go.”
“You think of your death often?”
“No, only when I accept stupid jobs, in the stupid jungle, going after stupid lost cities, and oh-so-casually find myself stuck in a stupid treasure chamber,” she snaps back.
On that cheerful note, the flashlight blinks one last time and then goes dark.